Hejduk was born in New York to Czech immigrants and had a Bronx accent, yet he loved the Netherlands—taking particular interest in Dutch landscape paintings and the transient perfection of Vermeer.
The only other ground-up functional building he designed is the Kreuzberg Tower and Wings, a residential project in Berlin, Germany, which was completed in 1988.
His other built works, such as the Mask of Medusa project in Buenos Aires, Argentina, tended to be large-scale sculptures informed by fantastic architectures.
His teaching career began at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1950s, where he was one of the Texas Rangers, a group of architects who venerated color theorist Josef Albers.
In the 1970s, he was one of the New York Five, a group of architects (including Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, and Richard Meier) celebrated in a 1969 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.
Devotees of modernism and the early work of Le Corbusier, the New York Five also became known for the criticism they garnered in a 1973 issue of Architectural Forum, in which five essays accused their purism of yielding unusable buildings.
Hejduk was an accomplished poet; his poems are collected in Such Places as Memory: Poems 1953–1966 (Writing Architecture).
His massive archive of drawings, which range from ruler-perfect geometries to amusing rough sketches, is owned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.
In 2002, the Whitney Museum exhibited two sculptures in an exhibition called “Sanctuaries: The Last Works of John Hejduk.” One of the sculptures, a rectilinear prism crowned with spikes and titled House of the Suicide, was inspired by Jan Palac, a college student who died in 1969 after setting himself on fire protesting the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia.
Hejduk’s writings, drawings, and projects are beautifully collected in his 1985 monograph Mask of Medusa, published by Rizzoli, and difficult to find today.
